Hello everyone! This is an area online where you can access links to my favorite sites, work to complete some of your in-class assignments, and find out what you missed if you were absent.

Friday, September 3, 2010

Poetry Friday: "Indian Boy Love Song" by Sherman Alexie

Our first book of the year is The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. Lucky for us, Alexie is not only a master author of many novels and short stories, but has also penned many amazing poems. To kick off our study of his novel, and our year-long study of rebellion, we're going to look at three of Alexie's "Indian Boy Love Song[s]" in today's class.

All of the poems we're looking at today come from the book The Business of Fancydancing by Sherman Alexie. I chose three of his poems that I felt would help us establish the issues and problems that our main character in The Absolutely True Diary will face. They are:

For each of these poems, I asked you all to read silently, highlighting any words/ phrases/ lines that stood out to you as important. After reading these one or two times by yourselves, I asked you to write down some predictions or thoughts about the issues and problems our main character, Arnold, will face in The Absolutely True Diary. Here's a (pretty bad) picture of what you all came up with:

I was truly impressed at how well you gleaned the major issues/ struggles that our main character will deal with in this book. We will revisit these words and predictions as we read.